Casey McQuiston's bisexual rom-com The Pairing will make you hungry

Romance novelist Casey McQuiston is having an amazing year. Fresh from the hit movie adaptation of their 2019 bestseller Red, White & Royal Blue, a contender for this year's Emmys, the Out 100 honoree has not only announced they're co-writing the RWRB 2 screenplay, but they're also about to release their fourth novel, The Pairing, with novel number five already in the works.

These projects have taken McQuiston on multiple trips across Europe, which you can stare at longingly via their Instagram and immerse yourself in with The Pairing, coming out early next month. The book tells the love story of Theo and Kit, best friends who became what seemed like the perfect bi-for-bi couple, until they broke up during a transatlantic flight to a European food and wine tour. Years later, with their nonrefundable tour vouchers about to expire, they accidentally book their "I'm totally over you" solo trips at the same time and are stuck together with a busload of tourists and a hot Italian guide for three weeks.

St. Martins Press

Since their breakup, Theo has become a badass bartender and aspiring sommelier with a talent for casual hookups, while Kit is an almost annoyingly romantic Parisian pastry chef with a reputation as "the Sex God of École Desjardins." To prove how totally over each other they are, they start a friendly competition to see how many people they can sleep with over the tour (spoiler: quite a few actually!) with the hot guide as a kind of winner-takes-all challenge.

What follows is a decadent journey through Paris, Barcelona, Monaco, Florence, Rome and beyond, sampling the cuisine and the locals with a detailed indulgence that McQuiston has perfected over the years. This book will definitely make you hungry, so keep some wine and fancy snacks nearby. (How you deal with the horny scenes is your own business.)

instagram @casey.mcquiston

A month before The Pairing's release, we caught up with McQuiston for a long chat about travel, the complexity of bisexual representation, how the RWRB movie and its upcoming sequel have changed their writing style, and much more.

(This interview was edited for length and clarity.)

Last time we spoke, you told me that you prepared for your novel One Last Stop by riding the Q train in New York from one end to the other. How did you prepare for this novel?

I would have loved nothing more than to take this tour from one end to the other, but that was not possible. As far as I know, nothing quite like it exists. I kind of cobbled it together from a few existing group bus tours or train tours, and also several different private tours that I took. I tried my best to travel to as many of these places as I could, because you really don't know what is going to be perfect material for the book until you're there. For example, in Barcelona, when I was walking through the Gothic Quarter and seeing how those balconies are inches apart from each other, I was like, Ooh, that is a scene, I will be using that.

I traveled to Paris, Florence, Rome, a Tuscan wine country day trip. I tried my best to eat as much as I could, taste everything, take so many notes. I took a chocolate tour and a tapas crawl in Barcelona, and a pastry tour in Paris.

Beyond that, I took some wine classes back here in the States. I cooked as much as I could. I feel like every time I was grocery shopping, I was trying to think like Kit and Theo, and what would they pick up or what would inspire them. I tried really hard to make something from scratch every day, to really get in touch with what that's like, to sort of improvise and create in the kitchen.

And then of course, there were like 5 million hours on Google Maps, so many details that are just me clicking one inch at a time through Google Street View. Like, Okay, how do they walk from this place to this place, and what does that walk look like? Honestly, I had a blast doing it. This is the kind of research that I am such a huge nerd for.

That sounds awesome. Weren't you just in Europe a week ago?

I was! I think I'm allowed to say this — my next book that I'm working on is another rom-com that is about a couple of characters that we've already met in The Pairing. I don't think I'm allowed to say which one yet. In order for me to write their story really well, I needed to physically go and visit some places. I’d actually never been to Saint-Jean-de-Luz before, so I needed to go and see what that was like.

I also wanted to go to San Sebastián because I wrote about it in the book, and I was really curious how well I managed to capture a city I've never been to before. I think I did okay. I mean, I definitely did not oversell how good the food is there. The food is incredible.

I think you know more than the average author about the discourse around stereotypes and “good/bad representation” for queer characters, so I love that you went straight for “slutty bisexuals” in this story. What were your thoughts behind that?

Authors and writers of queer characters at large, we can be very scared of accidentally writing into stereotypes and sometimes overcorrect, and maybe write in ways that erase people, or even accidentally make a loop around to stigmatizing that. I'm so thankful that there's so much representation of bisexual people in fiction, so much more than there was when I was younger and it was always like… There was an episode of Sex and the City where one of the girls is dating a bi guy, and it was a deal-breaker. I’m really interested in playing with stereotypes and preconceived notions of how we think these characters are written, and also with deconstructing that and playing with expectations of how I might write against that type.

I was really interested in this understandable pushback against the stereotype of slutty bisexual, because there are many monogamous, devoted bisexuals out there who are not slutty. But there are a lot of people who are very embodied in their sexuality, and the way that they express being bi is very open and very fluid, and it makes them feel very empowered to live that, all the way out. As a writer, I see so much opportunity to explore gender and sexuality and how they intersect through people like that. It felt like such a rich soil where I could sow a million different stories of how bisexuality can be expressed, and how queerness can play out in someone's life.

I also wanted to very simply say, And so? If I am a slutty bisexual, what is so bad about that? What does it look like if that is how somebody's sexuality is expressed and how they engage with it? It was such a joy to explore all of these different facets of these characters through their sexuality, and through how they engage with people of different genders.

This is the first novel you've written in first person, the first half from Theo's perspective and the second from Kit’s. It lets us see how Theo views their gender versus how Kit views it, and how that plays into their sexualities. What were you exploring with that?

On some level, it started out as a very practical choice. I knew that I had this character Theo who’d had a gender evolution in the time that Theo and Kit had been apart, and it was going to take Theo a while to warm up to Kit enough to be that vulnerable with him. I really wanted the reader to earn Theo's trust, too. I partially chose to do the first half of the book in first person to avoid pronouns for Theo as much as I could, to allow you as a reader to get to know Theo from the inside out.

And then when Theo is like, By the way, this is how I see myself and this is how I prefer to be spoken of, you as a reader can have a moment of contending with, did you see that coming? What were your assumptions of this character? I feel like every trans person and trans masculine person, and even just people who know trans people, will read the first half of the book and see all of the stuff that's built into Theo's character. All of these ways that Theo is contending with gender, without being like, I am non-binary, and this is what I do. As a queer adult who's at that point in their life, they're not going to be having these internal monologues about exactly what their gender is and what their labels are, because they've already grappled with that.

In a practical sense, when writing third person, I find that I often use they as a collective plural pronoun during sex scenes — and they tumbled across the bed. I knew that was going to become an issue when I had one person in the scene using they/them pronouns, based on my writing style. I was like, I think it needs to be first person just for clarity.

Then somebody pointed out to me that from Theo’s POV, they almost never talk about their own chest in intimate scenes. It's a big void that Theo is never thinking about, never touching or engaging with, or thinking about other people looking at it or touching it. And then when we switch to Kit's POV, we see Theo's whole body for the first time, and how Kit sees Theo's chest and how it's this beautiful part of them, along with all of these other beautiful androgynous parts that make up who they are.

I didn't realize I was writing body dysphoria into that POV. That was something I didn’t even intend to do.

In the first half of the book, Kit comes across as this perfectly romantic fairy tale character. But when we get to his point of view, we start to see how that kind of obsession with love and romance has caused problems in his relationships. When does romance go too far for someone like him?

That's what I love about getting to do both sides of this, especially when it's somebody that you have a really complicated relationship with. With Theo, their perspective on Kit is so informed by all these little resentments that have built over the years, but also these moments of self-comparison where they're like, I'll never be good enough for someone like him. And then you go inside Kit's head and you realize how he's philosophizing everything he does, and he's doing all of this agonizing inside his heart on everything.

The lesson that Kit has to learn, over the course of this book and through this breakup, is that you take romance too far when you forget to account for the other person in your love story having their own internal life of wants and needs. You're viewing this grand scheme of a portrait of something that could happen, a dream or a fairy tale. You're seeing it the way that I conceptualize a romance novel. And then this big cinematic sweeping moment happens, and it's perfect and it lives up exactly to my vision, and everyone behaves exactly the way that I expected them to, and it is 100% the romantic dream in my mind. The dark side of that is what Kit does and the mistakes that he makes when he's younger, which is to forget to account for the agency of the people who play these roles in his fantasies.

Like many people, I've recently revisited your first novel, Red, White & Royal Blue, and it’s fun to compare that to your latest novel and see how your writing style has changed. In RWRB, the intimate scenes are full of beautiful euphemisms and poetic descriptions of what's happening — and in The Pairing, the hookup competition starts with pegging jokes and only gets more detailed from there. What was that writing evolution like for you?

I think it reflects the course of me maturing and becoming an adult who is so much less caught up in my own self consciousness. Ultimately, when you are a reader and you're picking one romance novel out of a hundred off the shelf, you might be enjoying the sex scenes as a spectator, but you're not necessarily thinking, The author's mom read this and then talked to them about it, and the author had to experience what that was like. Or, The author knew that everyone they had ever met might one day know that they had had these specific thoughts, because they put it in a book.

That's something that you do have to get over as a romance writer, and some of us are much better at getting over it than others. I know people who write pretty smutty stuff, unapologetically, with no self-consciousness, and they are my fucking heroes. For me, the first draft of Red, White & Royal Blue was way more explicit, had way more sex in it. I used to joke that every draft I was like, I'm gonna smear a bit more Vaseline on the lens, make it a little more soft focus, take out a couple things. Because the closer it got to being real and being published, the more I was feeling shy and embarrassed and self-conscious about what was in the book and what people might think of me.

Honestly, a big part of it was just becoming more and more of a romance reader and seeing what was out there, and realizing, Damn, I'm really one chili pepper out of five, and there’s five chili peppers out here and people love it! Realizing that it was not something to be afraid of, or ashamed of.

Sex in this book is not just a fun thing. It's also a huge stage on which a lot of character stuff is playing out, whether it's gender, or running away from feelings, or how we experience food and flavors in relation to bodies and pleasure. There were so many things I wanted to sketch out in this book that I felt sex was the best medium to get these ideas across to the reader. It definitely took me a long time to build up that confidence, but it was really fun. I had fun writing a smutty book!

Many readers will draw a parallel between Theo and Alex Claremont-Diaz from RWRB, and other characters from your novels — people desperate to prove themselves and live up to a family legacy. Why do characters like that interest you so much?

What really attracts me to characters like Theo and Alex is the muchness of them, where it's just a lot of person. I have a big personality. I relate to feeling like you're too much to be loved, too much to have the friendships that you want, or the relationships you want, or the career that you want. I'm really drawn to what goes on inside a character like that, and how does it feel for that character to find the love that they don't think they can have.

I've been thinking a lot about, why do I keep writing about nepo babies? Because truly, the nepo-est of nepo babies is the Prince of England. I think it’s because I’m from the South, and where I'm from, your family's reputation is a really big deal. I think a lot about how that plays into people's self-realization, and how many people I know felt they had to leave their hometown to be able to come out. The pressure that puts on a young person who is figuring out their gender, figuring out their sexuality. I just keep revisiting that theme again and again, because it's something I'm still kind of understanding and processing about the environment that I grew up in. Why did it feel like such a huge liability to be different?

Theo comes from a big Hollywood family, and it was fun to see you write about fame after Red, White & Royal Blue became a hit movie. Did you draw from that for this book?

I think the biggest thing that I took away from my experience with Red, White & Royal Blue, and honestly just on a grander scale of being farther along in my career where sometimes I find myself in spaces with people I've seen on TV… Like, I went to the Out 100 awards and I saw Wilson Cruz and I was like, Oh my god, that's Wilson Cruz, he’s on Star Trek.

And we saw you!

Yeah, I know! That's the crazy thing, sometimes those people know who I am already. The biggest thing I've learned from all of that is how deeply normal those people are, and how deeply plagued by all the same anxieties and insecurities and interior lives that we all are, just in a different way or in a different place.

For Theo, I thought a lot about how the Hemsworths have a brother who’s not that famous, and what does that do to you psychologically? Do you feel normal about it? Are you thankful that you're not as famous, or do you have like a huge fucking complex about it? Theo directly references Chet Hanks at some point — I am fascinated by the Chet Hanks of the world. What does it do to you psychologically to grow up in an environment like that, and have to be your own person and do your own thing?

I think Theo approaches it from a very insecure, defiant way of like, I don't feel like I have a place in this family business, and so I am going to steer really, really hard in the other direction, into proving that I don't need anyone's help to make something of myself. That's a totally different approach than someone like Alex, who is like, I'm going to be very savvy about how I use what I've been born into, in order to achieve my own goals. And someone like [Prince] Henry who is like, I have been born into this, it's my worst fucking nightmare for me psychologically, but I would like to make the best of it.

You’re now working with Red, White & Royal Blue director Matthew Lopez on the screenplay for a sequel. How has writing a movie affected the way you approach a novel?

I feel like I have become a more deliberate planner, because screenwriting is so much about outlining and cards and storyboarding. You have to think about logistics so much, like, We need to think about how many scenes we have of this character, we need to make sure that actor has enough work to do. You have to think so far ahead. I've taken a lot of that back into novel writing and become someone who is really, really deliberate about my planning, going through a lot of different rounds of outlines before I get into drafting. And the way that's affected me is that I don't have to do as many drafts anymore.

If you could describe how the screenwriting process is going in less than five words, what would it be?

Okay, it’s six words, but a lot of them are prepositions and articles, so I feel like I'll be okay with it. I would say, “Whole new part of my brain.”

For any readers who now want to take a bus tour around Europe, do you have any recommendations?

First of all, if you're going to try to do any kind of food tour, I would go to the smaller, private independent tour companies before I would go to whatever is number one on Google Reviews. That was such a better experience. I felt like I was in the holes-in-the-wall and really experiencing the best of what the city had to offer, as a local would choose it. So if you're going to go to San Sebastián and do a pinchos crawl, or Barcelona to do a tapas crawl, I would definitely find a guide who's local to help you. Otherwise you are going to end up embarrassing yourself and/or not getting the best food.

Do not do what I did in Rome and rent a room on the top floor of a five story walk-up in July. Because it was 99 degrees every day, and I almost died five different times trying to get up and down the stairs. So just spring for the hotel if you can afford it, because it has an elevator.

My one last hot tip is, sometimes the best experiences and the best memories you have of travel are just sitting alone by yourself at a table, people-watching for a couple of hours. Don't over-schedule yourself. Leave yourself those windows of time when you can literally just sit in a place and watch people come and go, and see what life is like and be a part of it.

The Pairinghits bookstores on August 6.